The cosmological argument

Overview

Recall questions on inductive reasoning, Aquinas' First, Second and Third Ways and why they are cosmological, the rejection of an infinite regress, Hume on causation, the whole and its parts and a necessary being, the fallacy of composition, and whether the argument leaps to a creator beyond the universe.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is inductive reasoning, and what follows for arguments that use it?

   Model answer

   Inductive reasoning moves from particular observations to a general conclusion which the evidence supports but does not guarantee. The premises can all be true while the conclusion is false, so the most an inductive argument can deliver is a probability. Arguments for God from observation are inductive, so even a successful one shows that a designer or first cause is likely, not that denying it is contradictory.

2. 2

   Explain the cosmological argument in outline.

   Model answer

   It begins from very general facts about the universe: that things move and change, that things are caused, and that things exist which might not have existed. It argues that these facts cannot be self-explanatory and cannot be explained by an unending chain of dependent items. It concludes that there is something outside the series which accounts for it, and identifies that with God.

3. 3

   Set out Aquinas' First Way.

   Model answer

   Aquinas observes that some things in the world are in motion, understanding motion as any change from potential to actual. Nothing can move itself in the same respect, because nothing can be both potentially and actually the same thing at once, so whatever is moved is moved by something else already actual. A chain of movers each of which is itself being moved by another cannot account for any motion happening. So there must be a first mover, itself unmoved, which everyone understands to be God.

4. 4

   Why does Aquinas reject an infinite regress?

   Model answer

   Not because a very long series is hard to imagine, and not primarily because time must have a beginning. His concern is with series in which each member only has its causal power on loan from the one before, as a hand moves a stick which moves a stone. In such a series, if there is no first member with power of its own, then nothing has any power and nothing happens. The regress he rules out is one of dependence here and now, not one of events stretching back through history.

5. 5

   How does Hume's account of causation undermine the cosmological argument?

   Model answer

   Hume argues that we never observe causal necessity, only one kind of event regularly followed by another, and that our sense of necessary connection is a habit of expectation formed by that regularity. If that is right, we have no warrant to insist that everything must have a cause, and no basis for extending causal reasoning beyond the sequences we have actually experienced to the origin of everything.

6. 6

   What is Hume's point about the whole and its parts?

   Model answer

   He argues that if you have explained the cause of each item in a collection, you have explained the collection, and asking for a further cause of the whole is an unreasonable extra demand. If twenty particles are each accounted for, it is idle to ask what caused the group of twenty. Applied to the universe, this suggests the demand for a cause of everything may be a mistake about how explanation works rather than a genuine unanswered question.

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